


Cerebral Devices

by ava_writes



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post-Colonization (X-Files), Psychic Dana Scully
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:07:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29425026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ava_writes/pseuds/ava_writes
Summary: “Though he feels as intensely and intricately bound to her as a yin is bound to a yang, of all the great mysteries he’s studied in the world there is one he has still yet to solve: her mind.”In which a psychic Dana Scully grows stronger in a post-apocalyptic world.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	1. one.

**Author's Note:**

> Note #1: Scully being psychic was a concept that had potential as her main storyline (based on the numerous bits of evidence scattered throughout the show) but somehow got bypassed in favor of a reproduction horror story.
> 
> Note #2: The plotlines/timelines have been significantly altered from season 8 onwards for several reasons, but especially because nobody in the history of pregnancies has ever carried a child for twelve months. Even if the pregnancy involves a miracle baby.

_**June, 2003** _  
_**Somewhere in Pennsylvania** _

The boy sees everything from his steady perch up in the nearby gnarled tree: in one of the windows of what he initially believed to be the Mackays’ abandoned farmhouse, there is a man on the bed, lying still and ensconced in a very deep sleep. His body from the neck down is covered with a massive plastic tarp; all around him there are hundreds and thousands of pieces of broken white-hot metal circling the bed mid-air in a hypnotic, elaborate arrangement. He squints his eyes, thinking he’d catch the faint but telling shimmer of strings, when the door suddenly opens and a very tired-looking woman emerges.

Their eyes meet for a moment, and the boy notices that there is pain written all over her; not the kind of pain that stung and then quickly faded away before one could even remember hurting in the first place, but the kind that stuck around. The kind of pain that dimmed and whitened into a numb, visible scar, a brand of a memory that sat quietly in the corner like an old woman in a dark veil mourning deeply and waiting for death to claim her next. A pain that could bleed back out of its stitched-up crevices if one picked and tugged at all the right places. Instead of opening the window and scolding the boy for intruding, however, a prick of fear strikes her face and the curtains hanging on either side of the window draw themselves closed, as if some invisible force had intervened to separate the woman and her sleeping man’s strange little world from the outside.

The boy, both excited and alarmed by this recent encounter - it has been a very long time since anything of mild interest had cropped up in his life - jolts down the dust-blanketed road and back to his house, stumbling into the living room where a tall, bald man whose age the boy could never figure out sits in a rocking chair with his left arm in a sling, watching the sun setting against a blood-red sky.

“Walter,” the boy gasps. “You won’t believe what I just saw.”

* * *

**_February, 2003 (four months earlier)_ **

It happens for the fourth time that week: the lightbulb flickers off in the kitchen, the electricity sputtering and causing a sort of flash effect upon the pale white walls, before throwing Dana into complete and utter darkness while she’d been scrubbing dishes after dinner. Her gloved hands linger in the frothy water as she rolls her eyes and calls over her shoulder, “William, baby, I thought I asked you to stop playing with the lights!”

The lightbulb reignites, bathing the kitchen once more in a dim yellowish light and revealing a fair-haired toddler with mischievous hazel eyes standing in the doorway, wearing nothing but a diaper and a potato-smeared grin between his full cheeks. Dana turns around and sighs. “You know you shouldn’t do that, sweetie. It’s not nice. You’re gonna do my head in and, if it’s even possible, your father’s.” She pauses. “Oh, who am I kidding. He still thinks you’re an angel.”

* * *

Later that evening she’s staring out the kitchen window, and something about the sight through the glass touches her heart and soul deeply: Mulder and William, sitting out in the open field together, both dressed in their parkas and watching the smoky, dense tendrils of the surrounding fog encircle the land where the house - their house, their home - had been built on. William has a chunky flashlight in his fat little hands, and a great dust-tinted beam emits out of it and onto the grassy tract beyond. The flashlight gradually levitates out of his tiny grasp, and hovers in the air while spinning its light across an endless stretch of sky. There they are: her two boys, searching for monsters in their own front yard.

“Where are you going?” Dana had asked them when out of the corner of her eye she’d spotted Mulder helping their son put his boots on while seated on the bottom step of the staircase. William lisped, “Big-foo,” and kicked his feet into the air excitedly. His father explained to her, “He wants to go outside to look for Bigfoot.”

Dana placed her hands on her hips. “What stories have you been telling him, Mulder?”

His subsequent smirk evoked familiar memories - a decade’s worth of them, each one richer and more profound than the last. _You tell me. We’ve lived through them all._

* * *

The creation of William has had many beginnings.

It began, in some ways, with the healing of her infertility; her own body had once been trapped in a medically induced limbo where life could neither be created nor destroyed. Yet everything changed once she discovered the engraved fragments of an alien spacecraft on the sweltering, spacious coastline of Africa. It was as if her own reproductive clock had turned back time, the irreversible damage inflicted upon her by doctors with masks now suddenly, impossibly reversed. It also began when they shared a kiss in a hospital corridor as the ball dropped and welcomed a new year, a new millennium, a new life for them. A quiet culmination of a seven-year journey.

It began when his parents’ love began; a small cluttered desk tucked away in the basement of the FBI building, the throaty laughter that echoed through a rain-drenched cemetery in Oregon, the countless nights spent together in motels and hospitals across the country. The first time they kissed against the chain fence in an empty baseball field at night, and she went home smelling of gravel, ice cream, and his cologne. The early hours of the new millennium when she mounted him in his own bed, and he, despite the broken arm, fucked her like the end of the world was approaching.

The fateful day that not one but two Mulders entered this world; one from the womb and one from the grave. A birth and a rebirth several wards apart. In a way, Dana had experienced two miracles that day; she would never forget the moment she wheeled herself towards his hospital bed, a baby in her arms and the massive smile of joy that overcame her face when through his blistered and scarred exterior she saw the life drain back into him.

She remembers their first night as a family, holed up together in her old apartment, in the place before. Swathrd in a light blue maternity robe that accentuated the softness and glow of her newfound motherhood, watching Mulder in a grey t-shirt and cotton drawstring pants thump the baby against his shoulder, making soothing noises from the back of his throat over his shrill little wails. She could tell even then that he was going to be the father that his own father never was. By giving him a son she’d given him a part of himself that would finally love him back. By having a child of her own she’d released a part of herself that could finally prove the existence of miracles instead of longing for them.

Inevitably, however, their own history would catch up to them. A long, complicated legacy firmly steeped in conspiracies that would never let them live in peace.

* * *

Tonight she’s tucked in beneath the sheets with William in her lap, drowsily reading him a book about a bullfrog going on a wild adventure in the forest. He’s not really paying that much attention to the story itself, instead devoting himself to playing with the lengthy blonde-tinged scarlet threads of his mother’s hair. They’re halfway through the story when she hears the growl of an engine and a lush ripple, like waves crashing against rocks in the distance. William, occupied by her hair still, doesn’t notice, but dread runs down Dana’s spine in a succession of shivers; after nearly three years, they are no longer alone.

* * *

In the dead of night, a pickup truck stripped of its number plate halts along an uneven, unmarked road in the middle of nowhere; then a tall dark man in an even darker trenchcoat opens the door of the vehicle and sits there for a moment, staring out into the thick cluster of trees. When the driver starts to leave his seat as well, the man in the coat pushes him gently back with one arm. “We don’t want to give her cause for any alarm,” he reminds the other man, before leaping out of the vehicle altogether and sprinting into the forest clearing.

The man ends up in a massive overgrown field permeated by a dense, almost silvery fog that seems to conceal everything and nothing all at once. He can sense the intangible but obvious weight of nearby matter, but to the naked eye the area is completely devoid of it. He bends down to catch his breath, considers his options. She was supposed to be in this very field, and yet there seems to be no sign of life up ahead; at least not anything that he can make out. Eventually figuring that he has nothing to lose, he advances straight into the field and completes two or three strides when something truly unexpected happens: there’s the bone-numbing rush of icy water being poured over his body, followed by a split second of mind-disorientating darkness and then the reappearance of the field, except this time there stands an old but warmly lit farmhouse with a car - presumably stolen - parked near the front porch in an unlocked shed.

The man glances back and extends his palms, searching for the barrier he had just bizarrely walked through. An electric blue light pools around the outline of his fingers; it has somehow locked him in.

“Who are you?” a sharp but trembling voice suddenly cuts through the chilly evening air. “identify yourself.”

He turns around and finds himself locking gazes with a petite red-haired woman standing a distance away between the tall golden fronds of grass. She carries a rifle that is almost as large as her, and it is pointed with calculating precision towards him. “This is Special Agent Gene Kafka, ma’am,” he answers cautiously, raising his hands upward.

“How did you find us?” she forces him backward until the cool liquid-like sensation passes through him once again and the house has seamlessly vanished behind her silhouette. “Why are you here? Answer me, dammit!”

“Ma’am, please,” he begs. “We’ve been searching for the whereabouts of a female FBI personnel and doctor since the DC blackout. Are you Special Agent Dana Scully?”

The expression in her blazing blue eyes darkens. “I don’t answer to that name anymore.”

“I’m sorry. I came here to tell you that the FBI require your services in a joint research lab and shelter in Pennsylvania. Please allow us to negotiate-“

“I have no interest in negotiating with either you or the FBI,” she interrupts him. “Not now and not ever. And if you want to speak to my partner, then don’t expect to get anything out of him either. He’s done as well.”

“Put the gun down. Please. I don’t want to hurt you. I only want to talk. I am unarmed at this present moment, so you have nothing to fear.” Her physical stance softens slightly, but her rifle remains in his direction for a few more seconds before she gives up and lets it dangle at her side.

“Please listen to me,” he begins once more, keeping both hands in the air. “Regardless of whatever acrimony you have with us, you have ties to the FBI that you simply cannot shake off. We know your history with Fox Mulder, your experience with the paranormal. Your long history of service to the government-“

“And the government has given me nothing in return but personal devastastion. I want nothing to do with them.”

“You have a son with Fox Mulder.” She bristles at this, her knuckles whitening around the rifle’s grip. He is walking on eggshells at this point, and must tread carefully. “We know you do. You want to protect him, don’t you? Protect him from these vast, unprecedented forces that have stormed and occupied our nation for the last couple of years?”

A new fire is set alight in her eyes and soon the rifle is back on him. When she speaks, it is with an untamed ferocity that can only stem from a mother’s love and basic instinct to protect. “I will not have you use my son as a tactic to draw me out. To join your so-called noble cause. You leave my son out of this, is that clear?”

“You don’t have to go alone. You can take your partner and child with you. We have enough accommodation for them both. All I’m asking is for you to be honest with yourself and where your true priorities lie.”

He closes his eyes momentarily, expecting her to shoot right then and there. She doesn’t; instead her voice becomes fragile as well as frostily straightforward. “Agent Kafka, let me make this quite plain. I know you’re not alone in this - I know how this all works - so I have a message to pass down, and you will pass it down word for word. My current priorities are right over there in that house. Now if you know about my history in the FBI, you’ll also know that I am a brilliant shot. So do yourself a favor and leave us the hell alone. I will not ask you again.”

”Okay,” he yields. “I’ll go.”

She lowers her gun and steps back through whatever mysterious barrier separates the former agents and their child from the rest of this debris-cluttered, permanently damaged world, her figure dissipating in the open field.

* * *

“What’s wrong?” Mulder asks her sleepily when she trudges back into their bedroom, worn out; in her eyes he can see the embers of her simmering anger as she moves closer to the bed and crawls in, huddling her body against his; he responds in kind, draping his big arms around her collarbones and nuzzling the side of her cheek.

She leans her chin downwards to kiss one of his knuckles. Then her eyes flutter close and she confesses, slowly and painfully: “I think...whatever our son did to the house...his powers are beginning to falter.”

“What do you mean? He cut off our electricity a few hours ago,” he jokes hoarsely in her ear.

“No, Mulder. Somebody managed to get in.”

He sits up, leaving her cold and bare. “What?” he demands sharply. “I thought only the family could move in and out.”

“It was a man. A member of the fbi. He told me that they want me out there.” The words _out there_ are leaden and serrated in her throat. For her they carry the worst kind of significance. “I don’t want to be away from you. And if we all go they’ll find out about William.” Tears begin to spring at the corners of her eyelids. “He’s just a boy, Mulder. He doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time because his emotions get in the way of his sense of control. I don’t want them to experiment on him like they experimented on me.”

She can hear him thinking behind her, retreating deeper into his mind in order to understand hers. Then he wraps himself around her again, his mouth stroking the outer shell of her ear with a tenderness that nobody else on earth could ever replicate. “I don’t know how he managed to do it, but I do know one thing: we can’t stay here for much longer. If he can get in, then so can the others.”

“Where else can we go? The world’s not the same as it used to be. We can’t just pick up our things and move like we could before. It’s a wasteland out there. Sparse but dangerous in every way.”

“Scully, listen. we have a remarkable boy for a son, remember? He’s kept all of us protected for this long.”

“Yes, but even his abilities have their limitations. And I don’t want to place that burden on him either; we should be protecting him, not the other way round. Mulder, honestly, sometimes your fascination with William blinds you from seeing the reality of the danger he’s in.”

“I know,” he sighs, shifting a loose tendril of hair off her brow. “But don’t you ever get tired of hiding our boy away? I’ve always known he was special in more ways than one. He can do things that no other two-year-old - or any other human for that matter - can do. I just want the world to see how incredible our son is.”

“Of course he is, but the truth is he cannot live freely in a world as divided and unforgiving as this one. People fear the abnormal now more than ever. They perceive anything that appears outside human to be an unequivocal threat.”

He plants a kiss upon the crook of her neck. “Well, in that case the world hasn’t changed in the slightest.” Then his lips brush along her tensed jawline until he has them exactly where he wants them and he’s kissing her, and she’s shifting her face sideways to return it, deepen it, savor it. She is lulled into a blossoming sense of security and contentment by the wine-like qualities of his kiss and the warmth of his surrounding arms.

“We should still think about getting out of here,” he murmurs mid-kiss, and she hums along. “We have a fully functioning car, enough supplies for the road. Let’s not think about where we’re going for now. But we can’t live here anymore. Not after tonight.”

She turns away, and says wistfully, “This was our home for so long that I can’t fathom being away from here. Mulder, why can we never stay put in one place? Why do we constantly have to be moving?”

“I’ve been asking myself that for the last ten years, Scully, and I think I know the solution: never meet me,” he replies in that familiar dry tone of his, and she laughs and shakes her head in weary exasperation, lolling it against his broad shoulder. In that moment she wonders how on earth she managed her pregnancy without him, let alone half of her entire life.

* * *

_**Christmas Eve, 2000** _

_**Washington DC** _

By the time the door bell was ringing on the other end of the apartment, the whole place was already alive with a cacophony of noise: in one corner the stereo on the shelf was crooning with mid-century festive tunes, and in another baby William was in his portable crib crying his heart out, his fists balled tight until they were bright pink, drooling all over his Santa Claus onesie. Dana rushed into the living room wearing an apron over a crimson velvet turtleneck dress and hoisted the infant over her shoulder, patting him firmly on the back as she strode over to open the front door. On her way, however, she noticed that the rattle in his crib was shaking on its own, loudly enough to cause a scene. “Oh, please don’t do that, William,” she whispered to him desperately. “I haven’t told Grandma about you yet.”

She opened the door and her mother was there, dressed in an emerald green winter coat, with an equally bundled up Mulder standing behind her and flakes of snow pepppered over both their heads. “Merry christmas, Dana,” Maggie greeted her daughter, giving her a kiss and a hug before looking at William to pat him fondly on the cheek. “You’re becoming a big boy, aren’t you? You know, I told Fox on the way here that he didn’t have to give me a lift.”

“I just didn’t want you to drive through DC by yourself, Mrs. Scully,” Mulder merely said, locking the door behind them and shrugging his jacket off. “Scully, I’ll take Will, okay? So you can watch dinner.”

“No, I will,” Maggie interjected, grabbing the baby. “Yiu two must be exhausted. Raising a child while working can’t have been easy for either of you.”

“Oh, you have no idea.” Dana laughed, passing on a knowing look to Mulder in secret. “Well, the ham should be ready in ten minutes, mom,” and then she prompted her mother to move into the kitchen, offering her a seat at the dining table. “The place has been completely hectic all afternoon, with dinner and the baby and everything else. Poor thing had trouble napping at four and now we’re paying the price for it —”

The door bell rang again. “I’ve got it,” Mulder announced to the women before leaving the kitchen to open the door. He was shocked to discover Bill Scully on the other side, accompanied by his wife and their three-year-old son. “Evening, Mulder,” he said, practically seething between his teeth.

When Mulder continued to stare at them in disbelief, Bill’s forehead creased in annoyance. “Can we come in?”

“Sure. Merry Christmas,” Mulder said, tentatively stepping aside to let them pass through. He walked into the kitchen where his partner was having a conversation with her mother, and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt. Scully, can I talk to you for a sec?”

She looked at him oddly. “Okay.”

He led her to the hallway with a hand on her lower back. They stood there and she folded her arms. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, the thing is...” He lowered his voice, sounding as hushed and conspiratorial as he always did at work. “You told me that your brother would be stationed in Newport for the holidays. Were you going to tell me at some point that he’d changed his mind?”

She turned her gaze to the floor briefly and looked up with her chin still down. “Listen, I know what things are like between you and Bill —”

“Well, it’s not that I dislike him, actually, because I don’t. But Scully, he absolutely _hates_ my guts.”

She smiled. “Since when has somebody hating your guts ever bothered you personally?”

“Scully, there’s a massive difference between being despised by a complete stranger at work and being despised by your partner’s brother. I think you know that as well as i do. See, I know how this is all going to go down: he’s going to make a big deal out of me being here like he always does, and it’s gonna put everybody else off because he wants to make it known that he can’t stand me, even though it’s so damn _obvious_.”

“Well, look,” she spread her palms wide, trying to get him to understand the picture. “Bill is family. There’s nothing you can do about that. And if it makes you feel any better, you’ll only really be seeing him at Thanksgivings and on Christmas. You think you’ve seen and experienced the worst of him, but we ate at the same dinner table for eighteen years. Get over it.” Then she moved past him and called out to their company in the kitchen, “Is everybody ready to eat?”

They spent the next half hour conversing away over sliced ham, steamed vegetables, and christmas pudding that Maggie had made for the dinner. Bill often swung between pleasant chatter with his mother and staring daggers at his sister’s partner. Meanwhile Doris Day’s voice, sweet and smooth as honey, echoed from the living room. “ _Santa knows we’re all God’s children, that makes everything right/So fill your hearts with Christmas cheer, ‘cause Santa Claus comes tonight..._ ”

There there was a ringing in the other room - it was coming from the landline phone, not her cellular, and so Dana got up from the table to answer it. When she did, however, there was a complete static silence; no breathing or background noise. “Hello?” she asked into the receiver, a little nervously. “Is anybody there?”

“ _Dana_?”

Her heart lunged right up to her mouth. She’d never imagined she’d hear that voice again. Everything around her crunched to a halt; all other noises - the voices in the dining room, the music, the laughter - were all blotted out by this singular voice emitting from the telephone. “ _Dana, please. This is Missy_ ,” the voice continued. “ _You need to get out of here. You’re not safe. You’re not safe. You’re not safe_.”

She stared in paralyzed horror, the phone shaking in her hand. For several long, agonizing seconds it felt as though the whole world was caving in on her, the edges of her vision blurred with a confusion of  
melting shades, like a nightmare taking place in a kaleidoscope. A strange white noise began to rise prominently in her ears, ringing constantly as Melissa Scully repeated her words over and over, a broken record that only served to thicken the dread within her, drowning her lungs with it. Then Mulder’s voice reveberated through her skull, pulling her back to shore. “Scully? Scully, are you okay?”

The room had pulled itself back together. Everybody at the table was staring at her through the doorway, mostly out of concern and worry. Dana glanced down at the phone - which whined with the disconnect tone - and she looked back up to give them a pale imitation of a smile. “I feel a bit sick. Excuse me.”

She hadn’t been lying; once she’d retreated into her bathroom she’d thrown the toilet seat up and regurgitated bits of ham and pudding into the bowl.

* * *

It’s the next morning, and all the necessary resources for the uncertain journey ahead have been thoroughly and carefully packed in the back of the car: spare clothes, food divided into containers, bottles of water, a spare tire and tire changer. Dana holds William in her arms and takes one long final glimpse of the house - their house - the one place in which they were allowed to live, truly live, as a family. She remembers when they first brought William here as an infant, cold and despairing and vigilant to the point of paranoia. Everything they had ever known, swallowed whole by the invasion. All they had left was each other, and their own relentless will to survive. Mulder slams the trunk shut and wanders over to the driver’s side. “That’s everything. Scully, put Will in the back and then we’ll be good to go.”

“Mommy,” William babbles while Dana buckles him in his booster seat. “Where we go, Mommy?”

“I don’t know, baby. Somewhere. A new home, perhaps. Be good while Daddy drives, alright?” She pats him on the head, where tiny reddish brown curls spring and dangle, and beams at him, her little boy, before closing the door and opening another to sit in the passenger seat next to Mulder, who starts the engine. It sputters at first because it hasn’t been used in a while, but the car eventually manages to haul them through the field and past William’s forcefield for the last time. A seed of relief bursts open in her heart, something she never thought she’d experience while leaving a home. It’s then that Dana realizes that they have seldom strayed past the borders of the field for nearly three years; Christ, has it really been that long?

* * *

_**November, 2000** _

Until that morning, she had always assumed that William was a perfectly normal baby.

The doctor had said so; he’d told them that there was no indication so far that any aspect of William’s biology was anything other than ordinary, and that he was as healthy as a human could possibly be. After all, there was no reason to suspect that he would be anything but; his parents were ordinary, despite their jobs and history being less so. Aparr from a brief moment in time when Mulder had been infected with alien dna, neither of them had exhibited any sort of extraterrestrial abilities that would set them apart from the human race. All of this, solidified in her mind as the truth and only the truth, quickly began to unravel when at seven thirty she’d gotten out of the shower and went to check up on William, whom she had settled down for a nap earlier.

She could have sworn while wrapping her hair in a towel that she heard him cry from her bedroom, so Dana hastily put on her robe and hurried out the door to make sure he was alright; when she arrived, the room was eerily quiet. Her heart skipped a beat and her breathing grew shallow, and for a moment she feared that something had gone terribly wrong with the baby. Her brain ran through a series of possibilities, each one more wildly irrational than the last: he’d choked on something. the blankets were swaddled around him too tightly and he suffocated. There was a tiny yet fatal flaw in his lungs and it had somehow caused them to suddenly shut down. But her strong, unyielding conscience pushed those ridiculous thoughts back and she crept cautiously towards the crib. The closer she got, the more she realized that something certainly was off, but it had nothing to do with the baby’s health. He was lying awake in his crib, but there was no visible distress in his features or movements; rather, his eyes were deep in concentration, and in that moment he reminded her so much of his father, with his laser-sharp focus and quiet intensity.

Dana followed his gaze with hers; she noticed then that the plush yellow ducks hanging on the baby mobile had begun to tremble without explanation. At first she believed that there might be an earthquake happening; but then there seemed to be no vibrations anywhere in the ground underneath her feet, and everything else in the room had remained still and undisturbed. Any signs pointing to an earthquake were hurled out the window completely when the mobile itself began to spin slowly like a carousel at an amusement park, and the ducks continued to swing as if an invisible hand had taken the top of the mobile and was actively twirling it over the crib.

Her first instinct right off the bat was to call Mulder at work. It turned out that that was hardly necessary, for her cellphone had begun to trill on her nightstand. He’d phoned her up to check on her and William, lamenting that the office just wasn’t the same without her company.

“Mulder, I need to tell you something.”

She could hear him hesitate on the other end. “Yeah?”

“Something weird happened just a few minutes ago. It’s William,” she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, which came out in a largely unsettled shudder. “I can’t explain it but...the baby mobile started turning of its own accord. I never knew it had its own accord to begin with. There were no outside elements that could have made it turn like that, Mulder. No logical explanations come to mind. But somehow - I don’t understand it - somehow I get this crazy feeling that our son did it.”

The line went silent for a few minutes, save for the sound of Mulder’s thoughtful breathing. then: “I’m getting out of work. Wait there with the baby; I’ll be home as soon as I can.” And he hung up without another word.

* * *

They’re a few miles along the road, William having fallen blissfully asleep in the back, and the forest clearing that had once semi-concealed their home having long disappeared behind them. Dana rests her head against the window, watching the scenery pass by in a monotonous blur; she can hear the spectres outside whispering to her, communicating their regrets and prayers through the pine leaves and the howling wind, although she struggles to decipher them. Her left hand instinctively crawls onto the center console, and Mulder, without even looking, lowers his right hand to settle upon and squeeze her tiny slender fingers.

Dana remembers those few treasured moments when they took William out of the polluted hustle of Washington DC and to somewhere that was closer to nature; those Sunday morning drives where all that was tranquil and good was perpetually preserved by what seemed to be a mystical influence that hung over the area, and the dull, tremendous ache of the past was far behind them. Right now it almost feels like a Sunday morning drive, but like everything else in their lives, it doesn’t last. She is suddenly overwhelmed with various scents and images in her head: the cool, inexorable metal of guns and road dust being kicked off of moving tires. The dark blue material of jackets, all emblazoned with those three unmistakable letters. They are the jackets neither she nor her partner have donned in years, and being on the receiving end of them is considerably more terrifying.

“Mulder,” Dana says to him in a breath of a whisper. “Mulder, behind you.”

* * *

William wakes up to the sound of yelling. He frowns, confused by the sudden noise; his parents never yelled in the house. There’s an assault of bright lights piercing the fabric of the early morning sky. Then the car door opens, and he sees his dad staggering out of the car and talking to a bunch of strange people in blue jackets that he’s never seen before in his life. Up until now, he hasn’t seen other people around other than his mom and dad, and he doesn’t quite understand why they are there to begin with. His mom is glancing worriedly at him, her bright red hair eclipsed against the plain grey sky; she’s wearing a lovely pink scarf that smells just like her and he wants to touch it badly.

His attention, however, is brought back to the man in blue speaking to his dad; he’s saying “bring her out”, and before William knows it his mother is out, her pink scarf flying behind her like a ribbon on a pole. He wonders if he has to leave the car, too, but it’s not like he knows how to remove his own seatbelt. The next sentences that come out of the man’s mouth are hard to figure out; all he hears are “order” and “now”.

His mom’s waving at them all and telling them to “put the guns down. I need to get my son.” Then she’s moving back towards the car to open the door closest to him, unbuckling him from his booster seat. “Everything’s fine,” she whispers to William. “Be good.” He hears those words an awful lot: _be good_. It’s a plea and a command, both placating and urgent. Then she’s pulling him out of the car and bringing him with her to the front, her big hand clutching his as he waddles along. He can now see that not only are the strange people dressed in blue, but they carry what appear to be something like humongous flashlights, except there’s no lights attached and the ends are far too skinny. There’s something about them that makes them seem less fun and more frightening, though he doesn’t know how or why.

Two doors at the back of a car much bigger than his parents’ are swung wide open; it’s dark in there, but he can just make out a bright square of light on the other end with black bars criss-crossing over it. They’re being ushered in, him and his parents, the doors shutting right behind them. William’s mother hugs him tight to her chest, and he gets to bury his nose into her pink scarf at long last.


	2. two.

They’re in an abandoned hospital somewhere in the waiting room, refitted to adapt to the post-blackout conditions; scarce populations and even scarcer supplies threaten their survival. Everybody calls them “the Others” because they are afraid of the terrifying weight that less ambiguous words carry. Dana finds herself all too familiar with the concept of “others”; after all, her whole job once revolved around the investigation of “others”, other humans whose lives intersected with extreme possibilities, or living extreme possibilities with very human stories. The humanity in the strange and the strangeness of humanity. Her partner, deemed an unmigitated, irredeemable other by the FBI, had been relegated to the basement because they could not fathom how such a brilliant young mind could waste his talent on alleged but rarely documented oddities stored in files in a cabinet drawer.

By choosing to remain in the darkness of the basement with him, by embarking on this faith-based journey to discover the truth, she too had become an other of sorts. Though perhaps, in some ways, she had always been an other; the other girls at sunday school had been alienated by her all-consuming obsession with biology and medicine, and her fellow students at medical school perceived the saintly glimmer of her cross underneath her scrubs as an odd thing to be present at an autopsy. The outward otherness of her partner had perhaps allowed her to embrace her own inward otherness, an otherness that did not manifest in the form of delirious claims of aliens or bigfoot but rather in the inexplicable dichotomy of her scientific and religious beliefs.

William is asleep in Mulder’s arms, wearing the scarf that once clung to Dana’s neck that morning when they’d almost escaped but didn’t, and Mulder briefly glances up to share a private smile with her. This privacy, once taken for granted during those two years in hiding, is soon interrupted by the brisk but chipper clicking of heels travelling down the hallway, announcing the arrival of a tall brunette woman in a leather jacket. She stops before them.

“Agent Reyes?” Dana inches forward as if trying to affirm to herself that the face that she was looking at was indeed her old colleague’s; apart from a few fresh scars over her eyebrow and the grey bags of exhaustion under her eyes, she nonetheless recognizes the caramel warmth in those same eyes and the earnestly crooked grin. Dana leaps onto Monica Reyes to hug her; it feels nothing if not damn good to finally see another woman. Dana breathes “Thank God,” into Reyes’ shoulder, and Reyes embraces this unexpected display of affection.

* * *

_**June, 2001** _

She was still asleep in her hospital bed when a gentle knock on the door stirred her, and a woman in a sleek burgundy coat entered the ward; wrinkles of concern wilted her innately bright features and she appeared almost hesitant to walk up towards Dana, who was still frail and shaken by recent events that she still hadn’t quite come to terms with in her mind. “Hi,” said the woman, giving her a small wave. “It’s Agent Reyes. Sorry, did I wake you?”

Dana’s mouth perked up into a twitch of a smile. “It’s fine.”

Reyes sat down at her bedside and they were silent for a good long while until Reyes finally spoke up again. “What happened to you, Dana?” she asked softly.

It was the first time she had used her first name out loud, and it gave Dana a pleasant jolt. Mulder had always called her Scully, setting him apart from all her previous lovers and establishing her, in a way, as not only his partner in work but his partner in life, his equal, his grounded and more sensible other half. But Reyes calling her Dana reminded her of something else; it reminded her of the countless times her sister had sat next to her on the bed to comfort her, to confide in her, or simply just to talk. Reyes reminded her of those simple, summer-warm days before Mulder. Not that he signified anything bad, far from it; her life had been far more blissful and secluded, but she knew less. To know was to be more vulnerable, more susceptible to something more sinister and greater than herself. 

She did not want to think about how she’d essentially gotten her sister killed for knowing too much. Hell, she’d almost gotten _herself_ killed for knowing too much. Knowledge was a dangerous trade that she and her partner had dealt in for years, like a mysterious drug that empowered but never quite satiated either of them.

Dana’s head slowly turned on the pillow; the thin red streak on her face where she had accidentally dug a nail in and scraped through was still healing. “Agent Reyes. You’ve had visions before, haven’t you?”

Reyes’ head performed a slight jerk of affirmation. “I sense things that others don’t. Call it heightened intuition.”

“Well, in that case,” Dana swallowed, her composure inverting and shrinking into itself, ready to be just a little more vulnerable in front of this woman, “I had a moment of...heightened intuition.”

Reyes laughed. “God, it must’ve been really big for you to end up here.” Then she caught herself, the laughter ceasing as quickly as it arose. “I’m sorry. It’s just that i don’t think that ‘heightened intuition’ quite cuts it for you. You know, you didn’t just _sense_ something. Something much greater and more devastating happened within you.” _Not to you_. _Within you._ “Tell me what you saw, Dana.”

Dana stared at the wall, her eyes clouding over with the unconscious process of retracing a memory, albeit a confusing and painful one. “I had just put down William for a nap. He was lying on the bed, and I’d curled up around him and fell asleep too. It was peaceful at first. Quiet. Then I felt something sharp and awful, like a knife piercing my head. A loud ringing began to fill my ears. It was almost unbearable.” Dana shuddered, recalling the sensation. “A bright white light suddenly illuminated the room. It occupied the whole apartment, and it was coming from outside. The screams...God, so much screaming. I couldn’t find Mulder or William. I felt lost and alone.”

“What did you do when you realized you couldn’t find either of them?”

“I don’t know. It was like my entire conscience had fallen apart along with the rest of my body. I screamed and I shouted like the others outside. Then my muscles began contracting rapidly, as if i were in the middle of a seizure. That’s when I heard my sister’s voice in my head. She was telling me to get out of there while I still could. Get my two boys and get the hell out.” A deep, spiked silence followed, punctuated only by the steady beeping of the monitor nearby. “Next thing I knew I was on the ground, just barely conscious before everything went dark.”

Reyes observed Dana fiddling with her own fingers before cupping those clenched fists with her own. “You know, when Mulder found you, you were shaking and sweating up a storm. He said he didn’t even recognize you on the floor in that moment. It was as though you were being viciously possessed by somebody else - or something.

“I have to ask you something, Dana. Can you think of any other premonitions, any kind of unusual experiences at all that you yourself have gone through in the past?”

Dana’s face was blank for a moment before a series of epiphanies dawned on her. “My father,” she said. “I found him sitting in my armchair one Christmas night. He and my mother had just left my apartment, yet he was right there before me, clear as day. He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t figure out what he was saying. A few minutes later, my mother called to inform me that my dad had a heart attack and that he was dead.” There were other instances, too. Mulder in the night sky, risen from the dead. _How did you know? I just knew._ The phone call from her dead sister at Christmas. Emily. Her sad-eyed, sickly ghost deftly woven through the patchwork of her insurmountable grief. _Mommy, let go. Please._ The ship. She knew even though he had not spoken about it. His agonized screams as they tortured him over and over. The faint outline of him in her motel room, hours before they found him lying in-

“You’ve seen a lot of death and destruction,” Reyes told her, low and understanding. Completely understanding. “You see and hear the dead, though you only see mute facsimiles and you only hear disembodied voices. You cannot communicate with either, only passively receive. But you have also seen and felt hope. The hope of finally having a child. The hope of a lost loved one returning to you. This hope will arm you with a resilience that few others who find death in every corner will be able to wilfully possess. I have it too, Dana,” Reyes goes on solemnly. “I’ve recently discovered that we’re a lot more connected than we perhaps realized at the beginning.”

“So when you asked me to tell you what happened, you didn’t read my mind. But you could’ve.”

“I could’ve,” Reyes agreed. “But it also would have been wrong. I wanted to hear it from you personally. These memories are not anybody else’s to collect. They are not mine to intrude upon and extract against your will. You dreams, your thoughts; you must guard them carefully, Dana. They may try to take your body, your name, your life - but as long as everything in your head remains protected, all will not be lost.”

Dana lowered her head, rubbing the whorl on her index finger in a slow, repetitive motion, her eyelashes hovering pensively. “I have this underlying fear that eats away at me all the time that these things I see might one day become reality. There have been times when I thought I was going crazy. I’ve asked myself, you know, what if I’m losing my grip on reality? What if I’m trapped in a waking nightmare that won’t let me hide or rest? What if all of this is happening to me for a reason?”

“I know that often these visions are unwanted. They’re terrifying, they overwhelm you. But regardless of that, it’s a gift. You cannot let gifts like these die. It’s honestly a miracle that not only do you still have it, but it’s somehow amplified itself in these recent months. Don’t ignore it like you have been for the last thirty-seven years, Dana.”

She stands up, glances at Dana one last time in the doorway, before inching the door shut behind her. Meanwhile, Dana turns the memory of the vision over in her mind, and the first thing that she realizes is that she and her family have to leave this place. They must run away somewhere where the white light cannot claim them.

* * *

The shelter is rife with sickness and bitterness, desperation and death; she enters the crammed ward and all the beds are strewn shambolically around the place. She feels like she’s in some mental asylum without the insanity-riddled screams, just a strangely calm silence that is unsettling in equal measure. Dana has discarded her clothes from the house in exchange for a creamy white lab coat over the distinct material of medical scrubs, her long darkening hair restrained in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, and following Doctor Harold Patterson - a stocky man of middling height with beady eyes that seem to constantly search for the faults in things - down the narrow aisle of beds.

If she imagines hard enough she can reproduce the memory of her days spent in hospitals with Mulder, either performing an autopsy or interviewing bed-ridden patients with some unconventional disease that, according to him, enabled them to set an entire six-storey building on fire. But Mulder’s not here and they’re not on a case that will be solved (or semi-solved) in a matter of weeks. This is a very long, ongoing case without a certain, foreseeable end. Besides, it’s dangerous to have an imagination in a time and place like this; she must keep herself grounded in reality for the sake of her partner and their child, no matter how painful and vague the reality is.

“We call these people the returned,” Patterson tells Dana. “Those who disappeared during the Blackout and started turning up in fields or abandoned buildings as early as September of last year. We don’t know where they go or what’s been done to them, only that they come back with their brains completely rewired. Shifted. Altered. Not quite alive, but alive enough to be worth saving. Our hands are pretty much tied as far as a cure is concerned, unless we somehow ascertain the root of the problem. What do you make of all this, Doctor Scully?”

“I figured at first that their temporal lobes must have been severely tampered with to have caused such signficant memory loss,” says Dana, watching a woman with straw for hair stare into the ceiling, her eyes glazed over and eerily distant, “and it was easy to assume that this phenomenon was part of an ongoing surgical procedure, since there was no sign of blood or blunt trauma as you’ve mentioned previously. Although I’ve already run several X-rays on a selected number of patients and their results did not indicate any signs of tampering or forced medical intervention. Although the machine did pick up a few anomalies in that specific region that didn’t seem as much placed there by other hands as it seemed to be an ingrown or transmitted disease.”

“Transmitted disease?” he repeats dubiously. “You’re insinuating that these people all collectively developed a infection of unknown origin?”

“Surely you’ve read the history books, Doctor. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. The Antonine plague. The Black Death. Yes, I’m saying that we might be dealing with some sort of brand new epidemic, perhaps originating from...the Others.”

“But you aren’t saying that amnesia, of all things, can somehow be transmitted from person to person? My God, at this rate you’re starting to sound like-”

“Like _what_ , Agent Patterson?” Dana asks coolly, turning around to perceive him with a fully raised eyebrow. “Like a madwoman? Like a psycho? Or do you have another name in mind?”

This shuts up Patterson, at least for the rest of the afternoon.

One of the patients she sits down with, at least according to the partially complete records kept at the Pennsylvania shelter, is a local nineteen-year-old teenager named Tom Nelson. He is tall and wiry and bright-eyed in the picture but skeletal and gaunt in person; it appears that he has refused to eat his meals as of late. Dana sits at Tom’s bedside as if she were at home about to tuck William into bed, hands clasped in lap and waiting patiently. She introduces herself as Doctor Dana Scully, a title she feels infinitely more comfortable with. “How are you, Tom?” she asks him with as much warmth as possible considering the continual need to detach herself from all her patients, no matter how sympathetic their character. “I heard you haven’t been eating for the last two days.”

His eyebrows are like caterpillars, long and hairy and oddly fluid in the way they wriggle on his face. “You don’t know anything about me, Doctor. You just got here.”

Dana draws her mouth in a tight, straight line; getting to the point won’t work. She’ll have to beat around it for now. “How have you been feeling these past couple of months, Tom? You can use as much or as little words as you like.”

“I dunno,” says Tom. “Like the world has fallen beneath me.”

“Do you feel alone, Tom? Lost? Aware that you are back in the world you’ve always known but also not recognizing a single thing about it? Do you yourself feel changed in ways you cannot explain? Are you afraid of the fact that you’re unable to explain what’s happened to you?” _Believe me,_ she adds silently. _I’ve known that feeling._

His lips, thin and marked with a boyish arrogance, begin to quiver a bit. Both shoulders slump, rendering his thin frame shapeless and pathetic. “Nobody will tell me anything. They just say I’m fucked in the head, man.”

“They know just as much as you do, Tom-”

“Bullshit,” he snarls, his knuckles tensing up as he grips the edge of his bedsheets, “They know more than they’ll let on. You don’t think they actually care about us, do you?”

“ _I_ care about you, whether you believe it or not,” Dana tells him without a moment’s hesitation. “I want to help everybody in this shelter. I must help. It would kill me to think about all these patients being exploited for personal gain. I did not come here to gain or steal. I certainly didn’t come here by choice. But I have a duty, and I owe it to everybody here - including you - to find out what happened. To seek a solution to this entire ordeal that you have all found yourselves in.”

Tom is quiet for another minute or so, before asking, a little more symphatically this time: “When you say you aren’t here by choice...did the FBI take you here? I heard the doctors in the hallway talk about bringing a Dana Scully to this shelter.” Genuine worry is etched on his face. Her breath catches in her throat. He reminds her, in some ways, of a younger Mulder, hurt and angry at the world, hurt and angry at himself, filled to the aching brim with prayers that he fears will never come true; yet despite all the pent-up frustration and confusion, an innate kindness radiates against all odds in the shadowed, broken depths of his soul.

“I decided to comply with their demands,” she says simply without letting a single emotion trickle out beyond her elaborately constructed walls; a skill she picked up from years of practice. “They were very persuasive. But this isn’t about me, Tom. You’ve been victimized by unseen forces. I’m not about to let you be a victim of the forces hiding in plain sight.”

* * *

She’s in her new bed in her new room, tossing and turning, trying in vain to sleep, but the sheets stink of old starch and disuse and other strangers all at once, and the residue of today’s stressful events encrusts her like dried mud. It feels as if hardly anything belongs to her anymore; this nightgown isn’t even hers, with its one missing button and the distant dreams and clandestine trangressions of other women clinging to the coarsely wrinkled cotton. There’s a shuffling noise in the bed opposite hers - they’re in a hospital, so the beds only come in singles - and he’s creeping closer to her bed until he’s right in it, his own bigger, sturdier body blanketing her both protectively and possessively. She sinks into him reflexively, biting into the inside of her lip but still not opening her eyes. “I haven’t seen you all day,” he husks into her ear, kissing the space underneath it, marking her in the most intimate of ways. “I want to see you. All of you.”

He sucks along her neck, not quite roughly enough to leave physical imprints but just firm enough to make her gasp out loud; at the same time, his fingers are sliding idly down her thigh, bringing the hem of her skirt higher and feeling the milky wealth of skin underneath it. She sighs into his lips as those same fingers find their way into her underwear and begin to circle around her clit. She palms his stubbed jaw and nearly weeps when his other hand reaches over to thumb her cotton-clad nipple, feeling the pleasure unfurl like a rose in the springtime and she forgets where they are, because right here she’s never felt more at home in her life.

* * *

A thirty-something blonde woman with dark speckles in her green eyes goes to sleep the other night as normally as if she had been in her own home and does not wake up the next morning. A fresh flurry of panic surges around the bed where she once slept; she had not been ill as far as the others could tell and they begin to worry, because after all if a seemingly healthy and mild-mannered woman could succumb to the imperceptible yet bestial clutches of death than who is to say that they won’t follow her down? What if they’re all dying without even knowing it? What if death is slowly working through their organs and systems, thickening and darkening and parasitic, until one day their bodies, solid on the outside, simply give out?

In the lab, Dana performs her very first autopsy in three years. She circles the table where the body is laid under a broad plastic sheet, rigorously shuffling through details in her head, serving as an intricate mental cabinet of files and notes with invisible markers. _Caroline meyers, 32 years of age. Five foot six, weighed 168 pounds. Died at approximately 5:35 a.m. on March the 2nd._

The sheet is carefully peeled off; the scalpel, recently sterilized, is sliced through the flesh, creating an opening for her to make discoveries and find answers. She bites her lip in deep concentration as her gloved hands delve through the insides of this corpse; she is then shocked to discover that both the woman’s lungs are blackened and wrought with an abundance of yawning cavaties. “Oh my God,” she whispers out loud as she inspects the damage, wondering how on earth a human being could possibly go for that long with such violently deteriorating organs. They’re flaking at the surface, deluged with a glue-like substance that lightly burns at the touch. Dana begins to seriously suspect that a literal hell may have been festering inside of this poor woman’s body this whole time.

Dana glances up and her heart rattles in her chest when she finds Caroline Meyers leaning against the wall, still in the hospital gown that she died in that morning. There’s something about dead people - not the ones who were stabbed or shot or perished with a series of gruesome markings left to account for the violent nature of their departure from this mortal plane - that makes them look vaguely human yet unnatural at the same time. Maybe it’s the mask of innate detachment that death bestows upon them, or the lack of soul beneath those glassy eyes and that bloodless pallor. Caroline Meyers resembles a Victorian child in a post-mortem photograph, eerily still and haunting with a disquietude underneath the surface; her lips, which disappear into the dull wallpaper with the rest of her body, are opening and closing like a fish out of water, gasping for air. She’s saying words that Dana cannot hear.

* * *

“Agents, we have a problem,” Agent Kafka later announces to the rest of the FBI. Dana stands by quietly while the rest are seated around a table; they’re in a room which would have once housed a snack machine or a water cooler, where the loved ones of dying patients would have normally awaited the dreaded final verdict from the doctors. Reyes is the only other female FBI agent in the room, which concerns Dana; where did all the women in the FBI go? “As you may be aware, one of the patients housed in this shelter - a woman in her early thirties named Caroline Meyers - died earlier this morning in her sleep. Doctor Scully has a report concerning the body of Ms Meyers which could possibly change the way we perceive the nature of these experiments. Doctor, would you care to elaborate on that discovery?”

Her cool, analytical blue eyes wander from agent to agent, between each stone-faced expression. “In all my ten years of experience, I have never witnessed anything like it: rapidly deteriorating organs filled entirely with cavaties, worse than most cancers or any other malignancies ever found in the human body. Agents, I did not think it even remotely possible for a young woman to be so shockingly diseased on the inside and still appear the picture of health up until her untimely death. It appears that whatever happened to those who were taken has had a more lethal effect than any of us could have anticipated.”

“So what you’re saying, Doctor,” another agent speaks slowly, “is that those people in the ward...are slowly dying one by one. And we don’t even know it. _They_ don’t even realize it. How is that even possible? Are you certain that this isn’t just an isolated case?”

“Agent Walton, even if this was an isolated case, it still doesn’t fully explain the massive cavaties that previously went undetected. I have every reason to believe that each and every case is connected one way or another. If every single one of these people somehow came back with their memories of the experience wiped, then who’s to say that Caroline Meyers’ case isn’t also applicable to other victims?”

They debate on this for a while, and then somebody at the table makes a suggestion: a special facility up in Pittsburgh that stores a brand new type of metal - lentanium - that a team of metallurgists and engineers have been developing in recent years. Recently they’ve started creating replacement organs for the elderly once they begin to wear out and lose their function. Dana, who has never heard of the material to begin with, takes Agent Kafka aside to voice her concerns while the others disassemble and prepare for the road trip ahead. “Where did they find this metal, Agent Kafka?”

“Well, I’ve been told that traces of it were found embedded in rock along the side of a cliff in Marietta a few weeks after the invasion in Pennslyvania. They started reproducing it in gradual masses after learning of its potential to ensure survival.”

“Agent Kafka, it’s highly likely that this lentanium is extraterrestrial in nature,” Dana insists, “and you’re taking a very big risk in using it to support entire organic systems. You have no idea how the human body will react to having a strange, foreign substance-“

“Dana, Dana,” he interrupts, holding up a hand in front of her, “people are dying by the second. They are dying possibly the slowest deaths known to man and they don’t even feel a shred of it. And so far these replacement organs are the only chance we have so far at preventing the returned from going in the same direction as Caroline Meyers. Now are you going to cooperate or not?”

Her glare burns right through him. “It’s Doctor Scully. And if you’re going to the Pittsburgh facility, then I’m coming with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me. If you’re going to go and rewrite the human biological system, you might as well bring your one and only credential with you. No, I don’t wanna hear about Doctor Patterson,” she snaps when he tries to speak. “If he were just as credible he would certainly agree with me instead of going along with whatever you say. Listen, you were the one who wanted my help to begin with; I wasn’t snatched off the road against my will only for you to shove me aside when it’s most convenient for you. Doctor Patterson may not have the balls to go against you, but I’m not afraid to tell you right now that what you’re planning is beyond insane.” Dana stalks off down the corridor in a decided manner, letting her final word sink in.

* * *

A large dark van, designed specifically to blend in with the darkness of the night, rumbles across a dead, endless landscape carrying six passengers, including Dana, dressed in a thick black coat and gloves; she doesn’t particularly like sitting in a van occupied by this many men so she’s seated as far away from them as possible considering the tight squeeze. She finds herself thinking about Mulder and their son all the way back at the shelter; part of her wishes he’d have come as well, although she’d agreed with him that one of them staying would probably be for the best. Agent Reyes had initially offered to look after William at the shelter so that he could accompany Dana, although Dana reasoned to them that her leaving the shelter was dangerous enough, and that both parents couldn’t be away putting their lives at risk. When Dana had asked if she was going with them, a sharp glint - was it frustration? resentment? - scintillated in Reyes’s eye. “No,” she answered simply. “I don’t agree with what they’re doing, either.”

They arrive outside an old brick factory-esque structure enclosed by a reasonably secure chain fence and a crooked arrangement of other vehicles, primarily freight trucks and vans similar to the one they are travelling in at the moment. The place is heavily militarized, with guards bordering the fence and standing either side of the heavy duty doors on the front of the building.

“Sorry, folks, we can’t let you in,” one of them says when the agents start dispersing out of the van.

Agent Kafka prods Dana in the back, not roughly but just firmly enough for her to step forward. Dana does just that, while at the same time dreaming up a thousand different ways of killing him once they got back. “Sir, this is a medical emergency. There are patients back at the shelter whose organs are quite literally breaking down as we speak, and we’re trying to minimize what could potentially end up being a disastrous mortality rate. This cannot wait.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but the contents of this facility are classified. It is in everybody’s best interests if all of you exited the premises right now.” The last few words are spoken with a vaguely threatening tone, and the agents realize they have no choice but to comply with the guards’ demands; they all board the van once more and reluctantly depart.

* * *

One day Dana goes to check on her son briefly and is surprised to find Agent Reyes sitting cross-legged on the floor with little William, who is currently concentrating on levitating a deck of playing cards between them; they’re gliding chaotically all around the place, like tiny paper magic carpets. The corners of her balmy brown eyes softly crinkles with a ceaseless joy that warms Dana’s heart. “Where’s Mulder?” she asks Reyes, watching her son giggle and clap his hands.

“He went to take a shower.” Reyes hasn’t taken her eyes off of William, and her silence becomes a little unnerving. Like underneath the layer of childlike excitement there’s a jagged intensity that Dana does not entirely understand. But then shortly after she snaps out of this reverie of discomfort, because this is Monica Reyes, she reminds herself. Not just some stranger. It’s only Monica.

* * *

_**March, 2001** _

When Dana opened the door to her apartment - the same one she’d been living in for about a decade now - she was greeted by a sight that she was still adjusting herself to, for the sheer concept of it was almost surreal to her. She stood quietly in the doorway in her prim navy blue pantsuit with her work suitcase in her hand, observing her partner in a hoodie with that had grown darker and more prickly as of late - she suspected he was growing out a beard - sitting on the couch in the living room while their seven-month-old son sat in his lap stacking plastic rings in a moon-patterned onesie. If she had told her twenty-nine-year old self with her youthful earnesty and uncompromised confidence that eight years down the line she would have fallen surreptitiously yet unreservedly in love with Spooky Mulder and had a baby with him, young Dana would have thought her claims more absurd than the very idea of a unit in the FBI that specialized in investigations of the paranormal.

“How’s everybody doing?” Dana greeted them both, setting down her suitcase and popping off her heels. She practically sprinted forward to lend them both a quick kiss.

“Will’s recently learnt how to surf channels,” he said, picking up a misplaced ring off the ground and placing it back onto the couch only for William to throw it back down again with a hearty shriek. “But here’s the thing, Scully. I haven’t let him go anywhere near the remote.”

Dana settled herself down next to him and he took her stockinged feet in his lap to massage them. “You’re saying that William can manipulate the frequency and wavelength of a television signal now?”

He shrugged. “Well, last week it was the bath and kitchen taps. Why not take it up a notch?”

“You’re oddly nonchalant about all this,” she said as she slid off the couch and entered the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. “What are we going to do once we put that kid through school and his teacher notices him sharpening pencils from several desks away?”

“Ooh, pretty bold of you to assume that his gifts will be limited to something as silly as sharpening pencils by that time.”

“I’m serious, Mulder,” Dana insisted, returning to the living room with her forehead creased and her brows knitted together in concern. “We can’t hide Will away in the house forever. Sooner or later he’s going to have to step out into the world and people are gonna know about his...unique abilities. They are inevitably going to be curious, or worse, act upon their curiousity.”

“Listen, I worry about him just as much as you do. But what if we somehow teach him how to regulate these abilities instead?”

“Mulder, we’re not-”

“I know we’re not like William. But we need to help him. Eight years, Scully. Our son is just one of many phenomenons that we’ve witnessed first-hand. We can try to figure him out.”

“There’s a world of difference between merely psychoanalyzing a child with unusual abilities and raising one. We are not investigators entrenched in a bizarre case. We are his _parents_.”

“Scully, as much as you want the opposite, we cannot approach this in the way that ordinary parents would,” he argued calmly, his tone of voice transporting her back to their basement office when they’d have hour-long debates about whether cannibalism could truly grant immortality to those who partook in it. “Because our son is anything but ordinary. We have to step back and consider William through a more methodological lens. We cannot hope to help him in any way that is effective if we don’t begin at the root of the problem. Not that our son is a problem - he’s not. He’s a complexity, a remarkable anomaly with no visible explanations as to how William got to be William.”

“I understand that,” said Dana, lifting a fussy William off the couch and launching him into her arms. “I just...look, Mulder, I don’t want our son to become an experiment. I don’t want those men to get to him and see him as something to exploit, or as a vessel to cultivate biological miracles or power greater machines with. If we’re going to investigate the origin of his gifts, we are also running the risk of higher powers discovering what we’re doing. Because we have a history with the government.”

His eyes, previously ablaze with a manical frenzy borne by a need to protect but also to find answers, began to soften. He stood up and walked over to rub her shoulders before raising and cupping her jaw to press his lips to her forehead. “I know what you mean, Scully. I never forgave myself for what they did to you. And I won’t let the same happen to our son. You have my word.”

“They did things to you too, you know,” she replied wistfully while turning her face to kiss the inside of his palm. “The oil. The brain surgery. The ship. What happened on that ship, Mulder?”

He closed his eyes and for an excruciating moment he seemed like he was about to tear up, his external strength about to slowly deconstruct itself until the lost little twelve-year-old boy revealed himself before her. A flash of old, lingering pain began to resurface in his palpitating face. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you even if I wanted to.”

* * *

The laboratory is perhaps one of the tidiest areas in the Pennsylvania shelter, with a series of shelves stacked along one wall with a collection of files on some shelves and stored DNA samples on others. During what seems destined to be yet another tedious evening in the lab with no result or outcome, she’s by herself - no Doctor Patterson to chide her and condescend upon her at every opportunity - and out of sheer boredom-fuelled curiosity she starts inspecting each shelf in the room, taking objects down and glancing at every file in her hand; every miniscule note an detail about the returned, painstakingly assigned to each person who could not recollect their own identities or hometowns prior to the Blackout. _Alison Hall, 26. Hair Stylist. Charlie Gallagher, 41. Real Estate Agent. Tom Nelson. Caroline Meyers. Unknown patient. Occupation unknown._

They couldn’t retrieve the lentanium - and even though she had been completely against it at first, a part of her is despairing over the fact that their mission had failed. She does not want to admit it to anybody else, but the truth is she has no idea how she’ll keep these patients alive. The more she tries to dig for answers, the more she ends up unearthing a lot more questions than they had to begin with. There is no sign out there that suggests that this situation that they’re stuck in will ever improve; their world will never be the same again. The world she and they once knew had been lost in the fire years ago.

At one point she’s working to lift a metallic cylinder off of one shelf and instead of it popping right off it instead remains fixed to the structure and triggers the section of wall behind the shelf to turn and reveal a row of small glass capsules on the other side. Each one is stocked with a dense mud-like black liquid that makes her insides squirm and turn inside out. Why was this hidden behind the shelves and what purpose does it serve? She thinks about what Mulder would do in this situation and does exactly that: she removes a capsule from the shelf and pocketing it, before plugging the cylinder back in and going ahead as if she hadn’t just stolen what was clearly not meant for her to see.

* * *

She’s walking briskly down the corridor, attempting to not appear too overly suspicious to anybody who might pass by. The corridors never seem to stop winding or stretching and it puts her on edge. The first thing she wants to do more than anything is to get back to her room, get back to her partner and child, perhaps even ask Mulder for his much needed advice; it looks awfully familiar, she thinks. Like the black oil on the ships and along the secret reserves, its sinuous coils trickling into the eyes of screaming men and taking hold of them like a sentient disease.

There’s somebody around the corner, and Dana’s heart falters; she’s about to retreat when the figure takes another step forward, and there’s Monica Reyes, surveying the area, and in her arms a sleeping William’s head lolls on her shoulder.

“Reyes? Agent Reyes, what are you doing with my child?” Dana demands, marching forward. The other woman registers her voice and perceives her in such a condescending way that erases every fleck of warmth from her character altogether. Reyes pulls out a gun and cocks it in Dana’s direction, forcing the other woman to stop in her tracks.

A mixture of horror and trepidation twists Dana’s features. “What are you doing?” she repeats, softer this time. Her breath catches in her throat and tears begin to sting her eyes.

Reyes lifts her chin upward and purses her lips. Her voice is tighter than elastic. “What’s best for him. What’s best for all of us. You wouldn’t understand-”

“What I understand is that you have no right to take my son away from me. I am his mother.”

“You are his mother,” says Reyes. “And yet you do not grant him the safety and security that he needs. You’re a danger to your child. You and his father.”

“This isn’t like you, Reyes. You’re not-” Then she trails off; the sharp edges of the corridor’s shadows begin to distort the image of who she once believed to be an old colleague, and more importantly an old friend. It all narrows down to the basic and essential truth. A realization.

“You’re not Reyes,” Dana whispers shakily. “What are you?”

Reyes - or whatever the hell Reyes really is - watches her pained face and shuddering frame with a frosty sheen over her eyes. “I’m sorry, Dana. I have to do this.”

Then she releases the trigger and shoots Dana square in the shoulder. The gun is stowed away, and she’s going, going further away, then she’s gone - and so is her son.

* * *

She’s collapsed to the ground in a raging fit of pain; the bullet is lodged firmly in her and a pool of blood begins to blossom through her shirt. There’s a relentless ringing in her ears and she’s quickly losing consciousness; she feels a lot and also feels hardly anything at all. Beside her, the capsule inside her pocket smashes, glass skittering across the tiles; the black liquid inside is quickly expanding and it starts to snake along her face and directly into her deliriously blurred vision.


End file.
